Unobtanium is a physics/engineering joke, and placeholder term for a material with highly desirable properties but doesn't actually exist. It's a rather common term, and I found it an appropriate and amusing name for the movie's MacGuffin. If you pay attention, it's obviously a room temperature superconductor (Meissner effect), and it's rather common to call such a material unobtanium. Also, it's a literary device, since it proves to be unobtainable.

In the movie, the humans never wanted to exterminate the inhabitants. They just wanted to mine unobtanium, and were likely just equipped for that. They hired mercenaries to protect the miners, but were not affiliated with any military, and thus unlikely to have access to weapons of mass destruction. I also doubt they were permitted to do much against the navi, and likely suffered legal consequences when they returned to Earth. That said, since it's obvious there'll be a sequel, the humans will be bombing the navi again for some contrived reason.

Persistent and with ridiculous spatial memory and processing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWU0bfo-bSY

Generally, people with allergies avoid "fish", not "pacific bluefin tuna", and wouldn't try to eat atlantic bluefin tuna (conservation status of the two aside). It'd actually be rather dangerous to do the trials to determine exactly what is safe and what isn't.

It being fraud is absolutely true. OTOH, personally I wouldn't care if I got "Salmon or similar" so long as it's tasty and safe to eat. Overfishing a specific species for no reason beyond marketing is stupid but profitable. OTOH, when pufferfish gets substituted for salmon, that's bad.

You could likely cool your high temperature superconductor to nearly absolute zero (thus over a hundred kelvin of leeway), then encase it in aerogel or some similarly powerful insulator (vacuum?). This setup should last long enough for mobile applications of this technology.

Of course, if you have the resources and knowledge to implement this, just build a death ray and shoot down the plane. I don't have any idea why people keep thinking of ridiculous ways around TSA agents and security theater checkpoints. What's next, evading the Wal-Mart greeter?

Did a "denier" post this article? Or can we accept that there are a large number of idiots in both camps?

The government disagrees, and they're better armed. So long as we have taxes they will insist on intruding into your finances. Similarly, the police have grown accustomed to using financial information to solve crimes. Even corporations have seen the profitability of mining that data. None of these entities have any interest in reducing their power, and they alone are in the position to create, enforce, or fund the law. Thus, your notion of privacy (which I agree with) is rendered moot.

"Shouldn't be" is subjective. We can all think of scenerios where breaking the law is the right thing to do. I doubt anyone would argue that "drugs" are a such a worthy cause. Either way, if you break the law for some noble reason, you should also accept the consequences. Arguing the law is unjust is fine, open civil disobedience is admirable, but showing blatant disregard for the law and misconstruing privacy as your right to do so is disguising on a number of levels.

IMHO, you can potentially cut out a lot more, albeit it's obviously your choice as to how minimalistic to be...

I travel for business (so that's two cards), - Are you doing so right now? If not then don't carry them. If so, keep them in your suit, briefcase, or what-have-you.

have a joint account for household expenses (one card) a credit card for personal use (another card) - If you wish to keep separate accounts, you can just transfer funds online. Or just carry the joint card when you plan to make such a purchase.

and a debit card which I use the most (another card). - First of all, a debit card combines the worst features of checks and credit cards, and it's the least accept common method of payment. If it's stolen your whole bank account is at risk, and there are generally no incentives (e.g. cash back) to use one. Any merchant who accepts credit cards cannot give you a discount for debit cards like they can for cash. Second, pick one card and stick with it. If you frequently use ATMs, then I'd advise planning ahead a bit better, and keeping enough reserve cash for incidentals. As a bonus, your bank account won't be cleaned out by a skimmer or mugger.

a driver's license - Which is your license to operate a motor vehicle. Keep it in said vehicle. The US does not require you to carry your papers with you, as we presume you have a license to exist. Note that if you look hispanic and live in the southwest, constitutional protections may not be applied to you.

and health insurance cards... Plural? That sounds excessive. While it's not a bad idea since you never know when you'll be taken unconscious to an ER, you can copy that information to a piece of paper if you want to cut-down on wallet thickness and just take the physical card with you to the doctor. Also, being insured doesn't change your initial treatment, so it's not strictly necessary to carry your insurance card.

I suspect you forgot your shopping loyalty cards, business cards, reminders, social security card, and other items, the bulk of which require an over-sized, two-inch-thick-while-empty wallet.

Personally, I switched to a combined phone case / wallet that clips to my belt. I carry my driver's license (pointless but there's room), health insurance card (paper thin, not plastic), Google one-time authorization codes (paper), a credit card, and one bill to cover most any single debt that I might incur. That leaves one space so I can temporarily carry HID and ID cards. That said, my needs are not the same as yours. I have to be minimalistic as I often need to unexpectedly change into (pocketless) scrubs, and almost invariably am forced to leave my stuff in an unlocked locker (or pile), so my current system works well for me.

It depends on how you count. Read a list of these suicides. Notice how they're all in or directly outside the factory. People that go home to commit suicide, or become depressed so their output drops and they get fired, aren't counted in those figures. The rate of 13.9 is also for the population at large, not the demographics of Foxconn. For example, people at very high risk of suicide are not likely to be employed for very long at Foxconn (e.g. substance abusers [10 - 14 times more likely in the US], doctors [20 - 60 times], elderly alcoholic veteran widowers [>1000 times]).

If you want to compare apples to apples, look at a comparable company. McDonalds has almost the same number of employees as Foxconn. I do not believe that, every month, a worker publicly kills themself inside the restaurant. (Also, with counting, how many people are stopped from killing themselves by their fellow workers in the densely packed factory?) Most suicidal people attempt suicide in private, rather than trying to publicly shame their employer.

BTW, trying to figure out suicide rates in China in enough detail to account for these factors is next to impossible. The Chinese government controls that information, just like any information that might cast the government or one of its major industries in a negative light.

Well, a big problem with this requirement is that DNA isn't sequenced for identification. That's far too expensive (for now), but would allow for accurate identification excluding mosaics and twins (the former is likely underestimated in frequency since it's rarely relevant outside of this sort of analysis).

The traditional method is to chop DNA at known uncommon sequences so you get several pieces, run them on a gel that separates them according to size, and see if the sizes and number of fragments match-up. This works because humans have a few variable length repeats that vary in size and change with each generation (an over-simplification, e.g. the repeats often expand if the mother has the gene but not the father). Modern DNA analysis is a bit more sophisticated, but the underlying principle is the same.

So, how frequent are false positives? In an analysis of Arizona's 65,000 inmates researchers found 122 9/13 matches, 20 10/13, 1 11/13, and 1 12/13. Some of these were relatives but it's hard to say how many given the study was anonymous. So, it's a low rate but not low enough to use as police would like. I'm sure it'd be very easy to find some DNA at a crime scene, run the DNA search, find one person that matches and lives in the area, and arrest them for the crime.

It's hard to argue that it's a false positive if you live a block from the crime scene and fit the physical description, but merely because people don't understand statistics very well. (E.g. if it turned out to be an 80 year old Chinese lady and not a 20-ish Black guy that resembled the description, then nobody would arrest her.) And, prosecutors are going to argue the one in 108 billion theoretic odds, without any deeper understanding of the statistics and genetics that make false positives more likely.

Setting aside, for a moment, that I have tons of non-genetics issues with such a law, I must say this is premature. In a few years we'll be able to cheaply sequence DNA and have far more accurate identifications. Furthermore, we may be able to find genes and such that make violent behavior more likely, thus aiding research. So it's illogical to adopt this technology now rather than when it actually works well in a few years. It's not like the military immediately started commissioning Wright flyers as bombers and scouts.

Well, I picked Antarctica for that reason (and how it's a relatively unknown area with conditions most similar to other worlds). Quadrupedal or beyond doesn't work for traversing boulders and narrow ledges. Flight doesn't reliably work because of the weather conditions and fast winds. Climbing robots are restricted to far more consistent surfaces, at least the last I checked.

The human body trades raw speed for endurance and versatility. A specialized robot will always work better for what it's designed for, but a human is a far better generalist. Robots can't effectively walk because it's extremely difficult, whereas humans have evolved for it. I'd also imagine a human's path-finding ability exceeds a robot's, despite the variety of sensors put on them. In a few decades, robots may make humans obsolete, but I suspect humans will always be superior in a few regards.

Well, I know humans can still do a few things that robots cannot. Walk for instance. Show me a robot that can scale the mountains in Antarctica, or decide to explore a cave along the way. Furthermore, humans can operate autonomously quite well, which is important at great distances from Earth, or on the far side of the moon. As a corollary of that, while humans can make dumb mistakes, we don't cease working all-together or keep making the same mistakes if confronted with unexpected data.

The ideal scenario is to use a mixture of both manned and unmanned components on the same mission. As our launch capacity improves, sending humans into space should become nearly trivial compared to the overall complexity of the mission.

IMHO, scanning coins would be a good way to send the same message, but not risk running afoul of counterfeiting laws.

There may have been cultures that thought that way. They did not survive. Roughly four billion years of evolution has programmed us to use anything and everything as a competitive advantage.

I'm not sure if "benefit" is the right word... Being able to detect neutrinos (and subsequently the sub) might be the end for nuclear powered submarines.